Friday, May 16, 2003

There are two related proposals from the DCMI Type Working Group to the Usage Board available for review and public comment.

Proposal to DC Usage Board for a Still Image Type in the DCMI Type Vocabulary

Proposal to DC Usage Board for a Moving Image Type in the DCMI Type Vocabulary

Under the Usage Board Administrative Processes, proposals for new elements or element qualifiers submitted to the Board are posted on DC-General for a public comment period of one month. Public comment is open for this document until 13 June 2003.

In this important Web seminar, Marshall Breeding offers his top ten considerations that libraries should consider when choosing a library automation system. Whether your library finds itself automating for the first time or migrating from an obsolete system, these ten guideposts will lead you through the journey of selecting the best ILS for your library.

This is something new to me, but not to the rest of the world I guess, there is a repository for PERL programs. CPAN has library related tools under both the Biblio and MARC directories. Don't reinvent the wheel (or ILL program); check here as well as Sourceforge.

Here is a great idea; RSS feeds from the OPAC for new books, most popular items, or most reserves. It would be even better if the patron could select genres or formats. This might fit nicely into a MyLibrary portal. Does MyLibrary accept an RSS feed? Having the information in an RSS feed opens up other possibilities for distribution, placement and reformatting. Just a great idea.

Barcode generators have been a topic on the Perl4Lib discussion list recently.

KBarcode is a barcode and label printing application for KDE 3. It can be used to print every thing from simple business cards up to complex labels with several barcodes (e.g. article descriptions).

KBarcode comes with an easy to use WYSIWYG label designer, a setup wizard, batch import of labels (directly from the delivery note), thousands of predefined labels, database management tools and translations in many languages. Even printing more than 10.000 labels in one go is no problem for KBarcode.

Additionally it is a simply xbarcode replacement for the creation of barcodes. All major types of barcodes like EAN, UPC, CODE39 and ISBN are supported.

Another is available on-line. It makes 1-30 Codabar barcodes at a time, given the 5-digit prefix and what follows it.

Wednesday, May 14, 2003

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission is pleased to announce an opportunity for public, academic, and other TexShare libraries to participate in the Uplift Pilot Program for the Library of Texas Resource Discovery Service. Uplift is defined as the process of enhancing a local library catalog so that it supports the standards and profiles required for the Resource Discovery Service. This pilot program will provide funding and technical support in order to upgrade and/or add Z39.50 server capability to local library catalogs. This will prepare the local catalogs for full participation in the Resource Discovery Service. Many Texas librarians have seen presentations about this project at TLA or at their regional library system meetings. This project has been developed with support from the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge at the University of North Texas and funded through a Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund grant. Further information about the Library of Texas project is available.

I'm still thinking about the best way to put Easy News Topics (ENT) to use. It seems Radio Userland can create OPML files. The outliner is not the ideal thesaurus construction tool, but it could work. k-collector is an interesting application using ENT.

This is an experimental RSS/ENT aggregator. Clicking on the links below you will enter into different clouds of topics or jump right into one topic.

Each cloud has been dynamically generated parsing RSS feeds from various weblogs and sites.

If many sites used the same controlled vocabulary in a cloud, say library sites, one could group items by topics across all the sites. A useful structure. Does k-collector read OPML files created in Radio Userland? Or is that not what they mean by sites?

A major question is, just what is a library 'blog? Is it something like this where issues of concern to librarians are discussed? Is it a 'blog at a library with postings about local meetings, new arrivals and local contact information? Do they include 'blogs by MLS students which are often more about their life than library issues? On one level, I'd have to say yes, but constructing a cloud (thesaurus) for such a diverse group could lead to reinventing the LCSH. Just musing on the issue. Comments, clarifications and suggestions welcomed.

Maybe this would be a good project for an MLS student. A SLIS would be a good place to host the thesaurus and maybe some supporting documentation, tools, and links. Or it could be hosted on LISHost, which seems to be a de facto LIS gathering place.

One metadata scheme I've not mentioned before is the Directory Interchange Format (DIF). I use it at the NASA's Global Change Master Directory.

DIF is the acronym for Directory Interchange Format, a de-facto standard used to create directory entries which describe a group of data. A DIF consists of a collection of fields which detail specific information about the data. Five fields are required in the DIF; the others expand upon and clarify the information. Some of the fields are text fields, others require the use of valid values.

Through collaborative and coordinated effort between W3C's XML Query Working Group and XSL Working Group, a collection of ten updated working draft specifications has been issued for public review and comment. XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model and XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators are in Last Call WD status through June 30, 2003. XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and other specifications are dependent upon the data model, functions, and operators defined in these two WDs. Other working drafts include XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics, XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0, XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0, XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language, XML Query Use Cases, XML Query (XQuery) Requirements, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization, and XQuery and XPath Full-Text Requirements.

Directory of Open Access Journals is a service that provides access to quality controlled Open Access Journals. The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system, and it will not be limited to particular languages or subject areas. The aim of the Directory is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.

The DOAJ service supports the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). Thus, any other service can obtain records from DOAJ for inclusion in their collection.

The latest issue of Network Notes deals with Canadian Learning Object Repositories.

This list, prepared by Barbara Shuh of the National Library of Canada, provides a quick reference guide to Canadian learning object repositories and the partners participating in this on-going activity. Background information is provided on the series of Canadian projects that have lead up to the latest project, eduSource. The projects and programs listed in this reference have the following aims: to develop methods of storage for e-learning resources appropriate of the needs of the Canadian educational community; to develop methods of discovery; to provide Internet access to the resources discovered and to gain experience in the structuring and organization of the metadata that facilitates such discovery and access.

Tim Bray, well know in the XML crowd, has an essay on OCLC on his site.

It's Time, Long past time, in fact, to take the worlds' OPACs, and especially WorldCat, and build a general-purpose research tool for everybody; with this and Google we would really be covering the bases.

The community of librarians has devoted tens of thousands of lives, in aggregate, to the stewardship of this remarkable body of knowledge, and it is just wrong that it isn't an everyday part of the Web.